Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democrats are cheating by allowing noncitizens to vote.

But the poster child of Monday morning’s voter fraud sweep
— who the DOJ alleges was illegally registered to vote in L.A.
— is a registered Republican.

https://lamaterial.com/p/voter-fraud-arrests-republicans-california

@baldur Soon it will become "if you're looking at the code, you're doing it wrong".

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

GNUnet provides privacy-by design

Money doesn’t want us to have privacy.

I mean, just how many instances are gonna ping the URL? Several hundred, low thousands at worst?

Unless it happens to be some very large media content or a dynamic page with no caching, I’d think the automated federation hits shouldn’t be too bad.

The influx of users that might come after a viral post though, that’s rough…

Seems abusable though

If one instance doesn’t trust another, they shouldn’t federate in the first place.

Microsoft has been warehousing Nvidia rigs it doesn't have data centre power for since last year. Amazon admits it's doing the same:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-220-billion-ai-bet-data-centers-spending-challenges-2026-10

this is for preferential deals with Nvidia so they don't get cut off

come the bubble, how can we repurpose these things

“ #Trump has just claimed that the United States had done “a lot” for Ukraine, but that #Ukraine has done “nothing” for the United States.

This is unjust in the highest degree.
And not just untrue in the normal sense — it is a big lie, designed to bring about horror and chaos.”
Tim Snyder’s latest blog post

https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-big-lie-about-ukraine

@computerchronicles Well, I would say objectively he's pretty influential. We are even using the term he came up with, enshittification.

One would think he could be a great ally on our side. Unfortunately, I think his instincts are headed towards the wrong places.

Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery
L: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/deepwater-horizon-deep-sea-recovery
C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168357
posted on 2026.10.20 at 11:59:06 (c=0, p=4)

There are two proposed solutions I have seen. I do not claim that this is exhaustive, just only limited to the proposals that I have stumbled across.

FASP - Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider

The idea that mastodon has is to have a third-party service that does something like generate a link preview once and then share that to fediverse instances that need it. They have a whole spec they wrote up about these kinds of services that can be run to help out fediverse instances with different things like this, search, or discoverability. They call these FASPs - the repo with the spec is here.

I don’t yet know of any FASP that is live and running, so it is kind of a paper spec at the moment. I don’t do too much on the microblogging side of the fediverse though, so I very well could be wrong.

Federate link metadata and the post at the same time

This comes from an issue on PieFed’s repo. It is basically just an idea at this point, but it is a pretty basic one; have the originating instance fetch the link preview information and simply federate it out alongside the post itself.

Humble has launched a gaming cookbook bundle that has 27 great-looking books all about recipes inspired by popular gaming franchises:

https://steamdeckhq.com/humble-gaming-cookbook-bundle/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

@ben I'm bringing my newish gravel bike to a new store for a regular check-up tomorrow, and the place looks great.

Also, two of my kids are applying for one-week internships, and I hope they get them.

me: "I think my opsec could be better, i'm probably below average"

the industrial accident of a certificate authority: "our private key is 4"

Similar, except those are caused by users visiting a link, whereas the Fediverse issue is federated servers gathering info before users even see a link.

I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It’s no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.

Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).